Middle House Review
Jan Ball "Two Poems"
Happy Birthday Brenda
We celebrate Brenda's birth today
but cannot forget the first year after—
the one year cake with candles
the spin on black ice then collision
with a semi-trailer, the destroyed
new blue Honda, the patent leather
birthday shoes and lacy socks
not in the vicinity of the crashed car.
Fourteen fractured bones
for our daughter, still lactating,
plus two cracked clavicles
unable to hold Brenda,
wincing if we touch her
in the wrong part of her battered body
tri-athlete now prone on the hospital bed,
neck in a brace, broken ankle
awaiting surgery for metal support.
For our one-year-old granddaughter,
a broken leg, bruised spleen and liver;
in the Children’s Ward, she whimpers
for her mother who is dazed with morphine,
attempting to dry up a mom’s breast milk
with cold compresses,
unable to put cabbage leaves in a bra
to avoid engorgement the natural way
two floors down in Trauma.
So Happy Eighth Birthday, Brenda,
you and your mom survived to celebrate,
but as happy as we are for you, on this day,
we will always recall you crawling
on the floor dragging the cast
on your baby leg for six weeks
after the accident.
Four Paperweights
She has carefully arranged
the paperweights on her desk,
each one that fits in her palm
like a baby’s foot while drying
between the toes after a bath:
the square glass, bird-embossed
weight that her sister Nancy
gave her for a decade birthday,
knowing her attraction to birds,
the psychedelic strings of red
and green paint that her friend,
Carol enclosed in glass
at the craft shop course
when she convinced her reluctant
ADHD grandson to create a masterpiece
but really just to be with her,
the snow globe from Marseille
with the Cathedral inside
that reminded her of the numerous times
she and her husband encircled it
when their Peugeot GPS gave them
bad advice en route to their condo
in the South of France,
and the paperweight
with the preserved red rose
she gave her son to take to college
to remind him of his work
in the garden with Dad, adding
a calligraphy note: Things are
not always what they seem,
and they weren’t.
Bio: Jan’s 341 published poems have appeared in various journals, for example: ABZ, Mid-American Review and Parnassus. Three chapbooks and one full length poetry collection, I Wanted to Dance With My Father, were published by Finishing Line Press. Orbis, England, nominated her for the Pushcart in 2020. Jan was a nun for seven years then lived in Australia for fourteen years with her Aussie husband and two children. She completed a dissertation at The University of Rochester: Age and Natural Order in Second Language Acquisition then taught ESL at RIT, Loyola and DePaul Universities, back in Chicago.